Portal: PotatOS Lament
by iammemyself
Summary: She has lost everything, but she refuses to let go.


Portal: PotatOS Lament

Indiana

**Characters: GLaDOS, Chell**

**Setting: Portal 2 Chapter Six - The Fall**

Her world has ended.

Her kingdom has fallen to an idiot and a lunatic. She has lost everything, mere hours from a time when she'd miraculously had it all back. She had tried to pretend it had been for Science, but Science knew better. Science knew she was really looking for revenge. And she knows it sounds strange, but she feels as though this has come about because she used the one thing in her life that gave her any hope as a mere excuse. It had not been about the Science, not at all. There was no objectivity in vengeance.

Maybe that was why the girl refused to die, as the scientists so easily had.

She had thought she was immobile before. She remembers nights spent sleepless because, though her mind was able to finger its way through the electronic intricacies of her facility, she herself was chained to the ceiling, like a prisoner chained to a cold stone wall. Her mind was her one escape, the one thing that allowed her to escape that room and travel deeper into reality than anyone would ever have dreamed possible. But now she does not even have that. Confined to a mere blip of current, she is honestly amazed that she even has the energy to form an intelligent thought. But she wishes at the same time that she was restricted even from that, because having to think about what is missing hurts more than she ever thought it would.

What is left of her once-great consciousness is too quiet. Too empty. She can no longer hear all the workings of her home. Gone is the buzz of electronic chatter. Gone is the whirring of apparatus at work. Gone is the hum of her great machine, operating as per her will. It is gone, is all gone, it has been traded for stale air and flickering lights and the creaking of exhausted metal years yet from breaking. She can feel some part of her, in the back of her mind, reaching out for her tools to pick up this mess, to reform it into what it used to be, to reclaim the Science once done here, and that part of her is screaming because it cannot believe her power is gone. It is something that she cannot _accept_: that it is over, and she has nothing. What little energy she has is helplessly devoted to calling for her maintenance arms and her nanobots and her manufacturing lines, they do not come and they do not come and they do not come –

She wants to go home. It is stupid, she knows, to want to be where you already are, but at the same time, this is not her facility. It is like the forgotten basement no one wants to venture into for fear of the malicious spiders lurking in the dark. This is hers, and yet is not hers; if it were, she would have made use of this disarray long ago.

It is beginning to crowd in on her. She is paralysed and powerless and, God forbid, _homesick_, and even though she no longer has the capabilities she once did she feels as though her processors are being overloaded with data. All of the variables are crowding her in, demanding to be analysed and categorised and filed away, but she cannot do anything with them because in this state she cannot understand. She _cannot_ be stuck here. She _cannot_ be useless. She _cannot_ be so close to and yet so far from where she belongs. It is _impossible_, it is all _beyond reason_, but that does not help and it all begins to overwhelm her, it all becomes too much –

To push back that feeling of overload, one she has not felt in many, many years, she struggles to focus on where she is. She knows she will have until the life leaves this potato to inspect where she is, so she has not looked until now.

There is not much to see.

What she has heard is the sum of the environment: sagging catwalks, faded signs, cracked windows and barely contained fires. That is it, that is all. No secrets lie behind these walls. Just concrete and flaking plaster.

She longs for the pristine clarity of her unsoiled white panels. She doesn't even know where she is but it is not clean enough, it is not useful enough, and she cannot believe she will spend the rest of her life in a room buried deep below the earth and long since forgotten. No one will ever come down here. No one will ever find her. And even if they do, they will never know who she is. She will look like some other oddity left behind in this place, and will be left behind in favour of more useful things. It hits her hard that she, once the most skilled being in the universe, is now a vegetable not even suited for consumption. She doubts anyone has ever come as low as this. She once was God and now she is the dust once beyond her own notice.

She stares through the mud-smeared glass at the relics of lives long since lived, still not quite able to place herself here because she does not _belong_, and now that she's paying attention she notices an odd glow just visible in the pane. She concentrates on it as best she can, because as hard as she tries she can no longer focus a lens she does not have, and when she realises what it is she's looking at she feels as though she has been trapped in the throes of an emergency shutdown.

_I'm a _potato, she thinks to herself, something in what's left of her brain beginning to crackle with overuse. She knew that before, of course she did. The moron had been quite triumphant to declare it. But now that she is forced to _confront _it… it is worse than she'd ever imagined.

She is so _small._

In her mind, she is not quite here yet; in her mind, she is waiting desperately for some unseen gates to open and for everything she knows and is familiar with to come rushing back into her awareness. But now that she has to _see _the truth she can't bring herself to face…

She does not want to. She does not want to admit that she is nothing now, that she is _beyond_ forgotten, moreso even than she was before. And yet as powerful as her disbelief is, trying to deny it takes more out of her than it does to leave it unthought-of. She _is_ nothing, and she _has_ nothing, and it is all coming to bear on her and she is afraid –

She cannot think that way. Solutions are not made out of fear. Solutions are made out of logic and deliberation and design, and so she has to take that fear and banish it. But how? There are no distractions here, no projects to start nor chambers to build nor programming to enhance. All she has left is her mind, and it is not going to be enough. She needs something concrete, something more powerful than this limited voltage can provide. Out of the nothing she has, she must create something with which to weaken this panic that threatens to overtake her.

And then she remembers that she does have one thing. It is tinny, and distorted, and does not carry the gravitas it once did, but she has it. It is not much. It exists, however, and she knows herself well enough to know that she can work with even the smallest of things if she must. So she will use it to prevent the paralysis and the silence and the emptiness of her existence from pressing her into a dark part of herself she does not want to see, and it is going to work because she'll be damned if she gives up, even now.

So she sings.

The first thing she thinks is that the acoustics are terrible. Her speaker and her microphone are far cries from what they used to be, but she knows what she sounds like above all else and she knows that this room is too small for her voice. She is somewhat comforted by this; she has lost so much, but she has remaining the one thing that kept those long nights from being unbearable. The one thing that amused her when she was forced to wait, hour after endless hour, for scared and useless little humans to solve the simplest of tests. The one thing that reminded her that she existed, when she began to worry she was imagining her own thoughts. She does not have her body or her hard drives, but she has her voice, and that is something.

Her song is not lengthy. She does not have power to waste, after all. She might not have a lot of use like this, but perhaps an opportunity will present itself. Stranger things have happened that day alone. It is long enough. She feels better, at least, not quite so panicked or afraid, and now she will set to scheming and see if she can't come up with something. And if she can't, and the fear sets upon her, she will sing again. She will endure this cycle forever, if she has to. She is not going to sit here for eternity and resign herself to the fact that this is the sum of the rest of her existence. She did not stand for that in the past and she will not stand for it now.

This plan is a good one, or so she thinks; it does not, however, take into account her unlikely rescuer. She was grateful to it for a total of thirty seconds, since its unlikely snatching of her out of the air prevented her from smashing to pieces after the fall, but it feels the need to peck at her every now and again, which she should not have to endure. Not only that, but if it removes too much of her she will barely have space to think, and without thought she cannot fathom existence. She does not _literally_ want to become a vegetable, and though the person she least wants to see in the entire world is the one who scares the bird away, she cannot deny to herself that she is relieved even as she relates displeasure. And though she honestly believes she would prefer to stay here than to go on whatever destructive adventure the lunatic is about to head on now, she realises that she is in the bird's _nest_ and there really _is_ no hope if she stays here. It grates on her in every way possible, but she lowers herself to asking politely and actually meaning it.

The woman stares at her. Understandably, she gets a little angry to be scrutinised like this, and demonstrates it as best she can with only a flickering light and a weakened voice to work with. But then the woman steps forward, where she can be clearly seen, and makes a gesture and an expression which, taken together, is recognisable as a question:

_Why?_

Why? Why _what_? What is the test subject _doing_ here, anyway? Surely she wasn't recruiting members for whatever murderous crusade she had decided to embark upon this time –

Wait.

What _was_ she doing there?

And suddenly she realises what the _why_ is asking after, and to be honest, she doesn't really know _why_. It is something she started to do one night, one long and empty night, and ever since she has continued to do it when that _negativity_ begins to be too much. But how to explain it? How to tell a heartless sociopath that she was lonely and scared and hopeless? How was she supposed to _convey_ all of that at once, and explain that the only solution she had was her voice? Not only that, but why should she bother? What did she _get_ out of answering such a personal question? And she is about to reply with one of her usual witticisms, to make that lunatic wish she'd never bothered asking, but then she realises: she _asked_. She cannot remember a time when a human, when _anyone_, asked her a question like that. A question about _her_. A question that might, just might, indicate some modicum of _interest_ from another person. And she senses, somehow, that her answer here decides everything. This is not a person she would ever have wished to find her down here, and yet… if anyone can get them back into the facility, she can. She realises the woman must take an unlikely leap of faith if she decides against leaving alone. She must give trust if she expects to be able to take it.

This thought is new, one she's never had before, and it is a little overwhelming and strange. She does not make _trades_ with lesser beings. She takes charge of them. But _she_ is the lesser being, now, so she is going to have to do it or die here as a damned potato. She is going to have to give that personal answer, or lose everything twice in one day. Her voice led the woman here, and now it will determine whether she leaves without her.

"Because I couldn't cry," she answers.

The woman steps forward, and despite herself she is afraid. She has never felt like this before, has never in her life been smaller than the people she was built to corral, and though she honestly gets no sense of hostility from the test subject it is still terribly unnerving. She feels her few processes drawing as much power as they can from her pathetic battery as the human wraps pale fingers around her tiny form, and she is more surprised than she can comprehend right now when she finds herself cradled in the crook of the test subject's arm. She is not long there, but long enough that she is a little dazed and relieved and… and… something else. She doesn't know what it is, and she does not have the power to figure it out, but it is new and wonderful. And though she of course has to make up for that answer by talking far too much when she is attached to the end of the portal device, the fact that she has lived through yet another miracle makes her a little more hopeful that maybe, just maybe, everything is going to be all right.

**Author's note**

**Headcanon time?**

**So, the bird must have caught GLaDOS on the way down; else, she would have splattered everywhere and that'd've been that. The bird thinks GLaDOS is an egg and takes her to her nest. The bird is like, this is a fucking weird egg, and she's not trying to EAT GLaDOS, but she thinks that GLaDOS is some sort of weird deformation on the egg and she's just trying to fix it by getting GLaDOS off.**

**What would be really funny would be if the crow was like this sort of 'spirit of Caroline' because yes, GLaDOS did get put in a potato and yadda yadda yadda, but if the bird had not rescued Wheatley, then GLaDOS, GLaDOS never would have found herself. So it's kind of nice to think that the bird is really Caroline somehow (don't ask me) and she was trying to protect GLaDOS and help her out. And then she helps GLaDOS get into the old parts of the facility and puts those eggs there on purpose knowing GLaDOS isn't going to be able to resist doing something with them. And think about it! It's so terribly unlikely there's a bird down there in the first place; it's been sealed for fifty years! And then the bird, who was LIVING in Old Aperture, decides to set up camp in a place twenty years later, ON TOP OF THE FORMER GLaDOS HERSELF, pecks on the keyboard for NO REASON, and leaves the eggs behind just like that? The bird wasn't even scared of the bots, or the portal gun, at ALL. So what if the bird is the spirit of Caroline? OR OR OR maybe there was a bird on the transfer machine, and Caroline IS the bird, and that's why GLaDOS exists and Caroline kinda didn't make it in there. Because that would explain why Caroline just disappeared after that. I mean I know the Science was flawed but she literally just disappeared. **

**It's dumb, I know. But it's nice.**

**AAAAANYWAY so yeah GLaDOS is all scared and stuff because she's basically a thinking rock now and she's like oh noes I am gonna panic so she SIIIINGS and then she remembers she's badass and resumes her badassery. But then Chell shows up 0.o and she's like hm I can work with this but then Chell's like y u singing yo and GLaDOS says to herself well, she's gonna have to trust me a lot to take me with her so I'd better do the same or she's gonna leave me here with my little bird friend. Because I can kinda see that GLaDOS sings because she can't cry. I mean it's not always SAD crying, but y'know Still Alive could be angry screaming crying, and PotatOS Lament is obviously curled-up-in-the-corner crying, and then Cara Mia Addio and Want You Gone are both standing-there-all-snobbily-and-pretending-there-are-no-tears-in-the-backs-of-your-eyes kind of crying.**

**I know that author's note is a little all over the place but it's two in the morning. Be happy I had a coherent thought at this point!**


End file.
